The Battle of Cedar Creek (also called Big Dry Creek or Big Dry River) occurred on October 21, 1876, in the Montana Territory between the United States Army and a force of Lakota Sioux Native Americans during the Great Sioux War of 1876. The battle broke out after talks between Colonel Nelson A. Miles and Chief Sitting Bull broke down, and ended with the surrender of 400 Lakota lodges (with approximately 2,000 men, women, and children) to Miles six days later.
Colonel Nelson A. Miles led the 5th United States Infantry Regiment in the summer of 1876 from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, up the Missouri River on a paddlewheel boat from Yankton, South Dakota to the Yellowstone River, to help subdue the Sioux, and Cheyenne, who had claimed a major victory that summer at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Miles joined General Alfred Terry on Rosebud Creek in autumn and marched with him up the Rosebud to join with General Crook. The two commanders together moved east and crossed the Tongue River, and reached the mouth of the Powder River. Here the two commands separated, with General Crook moving south and east toward the Black Hills, and a detachment under Captain Anson Mills engaged and defeated a force of Indians in September at the Battle of Slim Buttes. Mills had been sent by Crook to obtain supplies from the Black Hills because their supplies were running perilously low, and at times, the men had to resort to eating horseflesh to survive.
After separating from General Crook, General Terry with Col. Miles moved north up Dry Creek, east and then south again to eventually reached Glendive, in Montana Territory, on the Yellowstone River where the troops established winter headquarters. Col. Miles equipped his troops with winter gear and established a temporary base at the mouth of the Tongue River.
Troops under Col. Elwell S. Otis escorted a train of more than 100 supply wagons that had been dispatched from a post on Glendive Creek, Montana Territory, to supply Miles's troops. On October 11, Sioux warriors ambushed the slow moving wagon train near Spring Creek, killing several mules and temporarily driving off the wagons. Undaunted, the wagon train tried again to reach Miles, but the Indians again attacked it along Spring Creek on October 15. This time, the wagon crews and their escort managed to fend off their attackers and continue their passage.
Soon afterwards, two Indian emissaries approached Colonel Otis and suggested that Miles meet with Sitting Bull, the long revered spiritual leader of the Hunkpapa Sioux. Miles accepted the offer, and set out for Cedar Creek, Montana Territory, north of the Yellowstone River. On October 21, 1876, Miles met with the Indian leader to parley between the lines of the Indians and the soldiers, at Sitting Bull's request. Sitting Bull offered to trade for ammunition so his followers could hunt buffalo. He would not bother the soldiers, if they did not bother him. Miles informed Sitting Bull of the government's demands for a surrender. While neither leader was pleased, both agreed to meet on the morrow after consulting with their subordinates.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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